IBM’s relationship with Openoffice.org goes all the way back to 1997. Ten years later, that finally led the computing giant to offer up a whole new Lotus product, Lotus Symphony, which was itself based upon the Openoffice.org codebase. The move came as a bit of a shock to plenty of folks in the IT business at the time — and today’s news will probably have the same effect.

You see, IBM has now decided that it’s time to dump Lotus Symphony and work more closely with the Apache Foundation on Openoffice.org. They’re offering up IBM-developed code, too, such as the Symphony sidebar.

Apart from helping Apache out with development, IBM’s commitment to the project also lends plenty of enterprise credibility. That’s something Openoffice.org desperately needs now that Oracle is completely out of the picture if it plans to remain competitive with the community-led LibreOffice fork. The Document Foundation has plenty of big industry players on its side — Google, Canonical, Red Hat, Novell, the Free Software Foundation, and the Open Source Initiative, to name just a few. A tighter bond with IBM can only be a good thing for Apache’s project.

There’s a twist, however. IBM isn’t going to start offering its customers straight-up Openoffice.org software. As it turns out, the plan is to begin distributing an “IBM edition” of Openoffice.org in the near future.

So now that IBM is sunsetting its own Openoffice.org remix, they’ll put their full weight behind the development of the genuine Apache Openoffice.org project so that they can offer their own retooled version to IBM customers.

Related: the company will also change the “International” in its name to “Ironic” so that the acronym still fits while more accurately reflecting their new (old) attitude toward office suite development.